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I've just finished listening to the final Inspector Morse novel - I've worked my way through them all in order over the past year - and, though I've struggled throughout with the relentless sexism of Colin Dexter's writing, I've found the end of the series astonishingly moving.
Partly this is due to the truly excellent narration from @exitthelemming (thanks, Samuel) which reached a peak in this final novel, and it's partly also the result of my having spent many a happy hour with Thaw and Whatley's marvellous televisual incarnations of Morse and Lewis..
But more than anything, it's due to Lewis. It's taken me a while to realise that Lewis is the hero of these novels: the honest, moral man mistreated both by the irascible, belittling Morse - much harsher than Thaw's version - and, at times, by Dexter, with all his egg-and-chips
... belittlement. You could perhaps argue (and clearly this is Dexter's doing as much as is the sexism and the patronising of his character), Lewis is almost a romantic hero whose mostly unrequited love for Morse - homosocial rather than homosexual - is the novels' abiding theme.
That's why, I think, I found the series' ending so affecting - it had me welling up more than any novel since Jude the Obscure thirty years ago. It's not that we're grieving for the old sod Morse, but we're sharing Lewis's devastation. And that's why the final scenes are vital.
In those final scenes, Lewis's respect for Morse is undermined painfully before it is restored by Strange, who reveals that the chief inspector's deceptions in this case have been protecting not Morse himself but Strange. Lewis can walk off into the sunset, his faith recovered.
Given how much I've criticised Dexter's writing about women, it would be wrong for me not to salute his achievement with Lewis in this final novel, and over the series.
(All of which means also that I'm now on the lookout - after a respectful pause - for a different crime fiction series on audiobook. I've enjoyed Rankin's Rebus for more than a decade now, and Morse too. this past year, with reservations, plus Harriet Vane. Any suggestions?)
